Introducing the Moksha Desktop

To understand why, you need to understand where Bodhi has come from as a project. Bodhi has always been a project based around the Enlightenment desktop.

The Enlightenment desktop however has changed a lot over the last few years. It went from being the “Duke Nukem Forever” of open source software without an official release in over a decade to having three new “major” versions released in the course of the last three years.

The problem with these major releases is that instead of continuing to perfect the end user facing components E17 started over the course of a decade, they were essentially internal tear downs. While optimizations are a good thing to be had, optimizations that break existing features users enjoy and use are bad. These tear downs were rushed to meet release deadlines and did not have the same quality and stability the E17 desktop had come to know.

The E18 desktop was so bad Bodhi skipped it entirely (although you can still find old packages in the 2.4.0 testing branch). When E19 released in the fall of 2014 it did make things better, but that was not difficult considering the mess E18 was.

E19 was usable enough that I gave it an honest try. I spent hours working with the upstream developers and filing bug reports. The biggest issue was that almostnone of the Enlightenment developers were using E19 as their daily desktop. As soon as it was released they jumped on to their next rewrite – E20.

After my umpteeth bug report was met with “Works with E from Git” I was ready to call it quits. In fact for several months I did essentially quit. I was so frustrated I stepped away from the project I had devoted countless hours to over four years.

After coming back with a breath of fresh air at the start of 2015, I put aside my personal thoughts about E19 and pushed out the Bodhi 3.0.0 release that uses E19 as its “default” desktop today. However, we did not just offer the E19 desktop, our “Legacy” image targeted at old computers still used the E17 desktop. The reason for this is because E19 was no longer as lightweight and it performed very poorly on older hardware.

On top of the performance issues, E19 did not allow for me personally to have the same workflow I enjoyed under E17 due to features it no longer had. Because of this I had changed to using the E17 on all of my Bodhi 3 computers – even my high end ones. This got me to thinking how many of our existing Bodhi users felt the same way, so I opened a discussion about it on our user forums.

I found many felt similar to how I did. So that left only one question: What was to be done about it? After much reflection, I came to the same conclusion others had before me that lead to the creation of the Mate and Trinity desktops – fork it.

So that brings us to the second question people are sure to have:

What is Moksha?

Well, the word “Moksha” (pronounced “mohk-shuh”) is Sanskrit in origin just like Bodhi. It means “emancipation, liberation, or release”. When I was searching for a name it seemed fitting since we are striking out on our own.

As a software project Moksha will be a continuation of the E17 desktop. We will start by integrating all of the Bodhi changes we have simply been patching into the source code over the years and fixing the few issues the desktop has. Once this is done we will begin back porting a few of the more useful features E18 and E19 introduced to the Enlightenment desktop and finally, we will introduce a few new things we think will improve the end user experience.

That brings us to the last question I am going to field in this post today:

Where does that leave Bodhi and the Enlightenment desktop?

Obviously Bodhi 3.0.0 uses the E19 desktop and we will not be releasing a new ISO image that changes this. Users who are content with the E19 desktop should continue to use it and we will continue to package updates for the desktop and push them into the Bodhi repository. We will also continue to provide the latest Enlightenment Foundation Libraries and Elementary binaries as Moksha still depends on these.

The first update release to Bodhi 3 will be 3.1.0, which is targeted for a release in August of this year. This release will use the E17 based Moksha desktop across all of its default ISO images. This will allow us to provide a uniform end user experience across all of our versions instead of having a differentiation between the “standard” and “legacy” releases. We will continue to provide the latest E19 desktop in our repositories for those who prefer it.

This is a big step for the Bodhi project. Only time will tell if it is a good one or a bad one. If you are a developer interested in getting involved with this project, please let us know by joining our user forums or dropping an email to Jeff at BodhiLinux dot com. Also remember that in a little over two weeks we will be sending out a Chromebook to a Bodhi contributor, so this is a great time to get involved with the project!

I spent some time using Bodhi Linux 2.x a couple of years back. The last time I tried it was with the version 3 release. It was as you have already stated, so no need to repeat. I would like to pass on the one and only reason I couldn’t adopt Bodhi and recommend/install it on clients’ systems: font control on GTK apps. You can tell me all you want about scaling and click here and there. It didn’t work well enough to keep E17 fonts large enough to read and GTK fonts small enough to fit into a bread box. Other than this, I super enjoyed the performance of E17 and the distribution. If you have already, or will have resolved this condition in Moksha, I will be coming back for some test runs and hope I can incorporate this into my clients’ solutions. Regardless, I appreciate your hard work, and this tough decision you are making, which speaks much to the person, programmer and Linux user that you are. Thanks.

Tried Bodhi 3.0 a few months ago on a Samsung N130netbook I picked up for note taking in meetings and light office processing work. The problems with E19 and the complete inability to replace EFM with PCmanFM made me jump to LXLE. I’m competent with PCs and can wrangle a bash shell, but I wanted something to just work out of the ISO, so I could spend my time configuring the desktop and getting on with business.
I do miss the smoothness of Bodhi /E17 though – so if the new release is “file manager agnostic” then I’ll be jumping back in straight away!

Thanks Jeff,
I hadn’t realised that. A search on DDG and the Bodhi forums seemed to indicate that I could install PCmanFM via package management, but that double clicking desktop launchers and some other automatic actions would still default to EFM. Most of the guidance seemed to be to manually alter .config files, or run bash scripts, and even then EFM would remain lurking in the background for some tasks, a bit like Internet Explorer in Windows.

Now, EFM is a fine file manager for what it does, but I like a few more features. I’m not a fanatic about it; in my main distro I use Thunar on SalixOS, but PCmanFM seems to do everything I want it to (thumbnailing, drag and drop, right click context menu actions etc.) I just wanted to make the point that now would be a grand time to make that part of the WM modular, and allow complete replacement of the default file manager with another.

Of course, in real life I’m a sys admin and nerwork technician working on Windows domains in schools; not a programmer. So I apologise if I’ve asked you to move the world, just to give me a little more shade for my eyes! 🙂

Out if curiosity, what features do you miss from e19 that was in e17? I’ve been daily user of e17 for years, then switched to OS X for a few years and got back to Linux over a year ago. Since that i’ve been using few different DE/WMs including e19 as daily for past 6 months or longer and haven’t noticed anything missing for me, as a regular user, except maybe some themes (i found almost all external themes to look awful, there’s also no theme browser in settings menu like it was in e17) like gant in the past. What was removed exacly?

Functional systray, ability to mix and match theme components, non-optional compositing, third party modules, and E19 also has bugs that cause Google’s Chrome browser to lock up on you during normal usage.

That make sense. I never really needed systray for my workflow. I learned to live without it and spread apps over the virutal desktops since the early versions of e17 which didn’t have or had a very bad support for systray as well. Theming e is/was kinda hard topic. I’ve been using 2 or 3 themes under e17 but then format changed and some weren’t updated. I didn’t even bother to look at themes in detail for e19 as i found all of the quite ugly and kept using the default one. As for Chrome, i kept using Firefox all the time so no issue here.

Thanks for explaining. I didn’t know they’ve removed so much. For me, the default setup was enough – i prefer things as simple as possbile and i still think that the way e17/e19 handles windows and virtual destkop is the easiest and the most convinient among all the other de/wm’s i’ve tried for the past 20-23 years. It’s a fact that while e development sped up quite a lot, the interest seems to drop and so the modules and decent looking themes.

I miss the engage module, I had a very nice taskbar that read ALL my apps, unlike this new iBar that doesn’t display some apps. I also had the ability to take, for instance, the look of the watch of a certain theme and combine it with the look of other elements of different themes.

By the way, wouldn’t just be easier to ship the next Bodhi with the E17 desktop instead of a fork. I think that is just better to take what already exists instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, current users could purge E19 and just install E17 -is that posible anyway?-. Wherever you do I wish good luck because Bodhi LInux is my main distro and I feel that this E19 was a step back, but I have to admit that I’m liking the minimalistic look.

May God bring Moksha to life. I’ve been a fan of bodhi since alpha 1, easy to use and fantastic for new users. I miss the days enlightenment ran with gnome back in 1999, I hope this will better serve it’s users, looking forward to the build and the status of a desktop engineered with gnu/linux in mind. Looks like I may have found a desktop of choice.

I don’t always comment on blog posts, but when I do, they’re usually my own. And this one.

For those who don’t know me, my name is Mike Blumenkrantz, and I have been doing some work on Enlightenment over the past few years.

I take no exception to someone forking a project that I’ve spent the majority of my working hours developing over the past few years–this is what Open Source is about, and I support everyone’s right to change the target direction of development if they have the time and motivation.

What I am somewhat upset with is the language used in this post to justify the forking. Based on this article, it would seem that nothing was being done to address the flood of bug submissions after E19 release, and that the hordes of neckbearded Enlightenment developers immediately started refactoring everything at once to begin working towards the next big release. This is simply not the case; the truth is that several months were spent on bug fixes after a 6 month feature freeze, and we did the best that we could given various circumstances and information provided in the tickets which were submitted.
On a more personal and specific note, however, at no point did anyone from Bodhi ever reach out to me and say “we need these issues fixed asap” or “we’d like you to integrate these patches we’ve been maintaining”; among other things, I suffer from chronic insomnia so it’s not as though I am hard to reach at most times of day or time zones.

I’ve been supporting Enlightenment development for a few years now with the intent to give it the best user experience wherever possible: whether by adding features, fixing bugs, or writing documentation, this has always been my aim. While the right to fork is certainly a great benefit of Open Source, I believe that the greatest benefit is the collaborative environment that is created when many users and developers come together towards a common goal. It seems that our goals have diverged, which I’m sorry to hear, but I wish you and your users the best of luck in reaching your objectives.

zmike, thanks for your development efforts on enlightenment, although i am a full time unity user because i love global menu and the shortcuts, e is my 2nd favorite de and i promote it often, it is simply amazing.

i agree with you that the great strength of open source is the collaborative element, but as you know, forked projects often merge too, and if the bodhi fork of e makes some great and useful changes, i would hope they too make in into the upstream e and hopefully, someday the projects will come together again for a badder faster leaner e. it’s true that e17 was fantastic on older computers, and the newer e’s have become slower, i would love to see the speed and the light resource usage of e 17 continue in e in the future.

zmike this is probable going to sound harsh, why has the glaring UI layout problems on a lot of dialogs
remained all these years and user interface elements?

And stuff like entries in the settings panel remained without icons?

Popups over icons in the filemanager have scrollbars but cannot be scrolled because the popup
does not remain when the cursor leaves the hovered over icon?
It could be fixed if you could use the mouse wheel while the cursor is over the icon to
scroll through the file preview.

There is so much that is truly awesome about enlightenment17+ but so much
of it has never been fixed or seems to suffer from terrible quality control
in lack of user interface layout guide lines.

Not the least of which that is awesome about it is being what seems to be the lightest full fledge desktop environment,
and one of the prettiest.

Entrance has the potential of being amazing and beautiful but instead because it suffers
from layout issues that make it look like xdm only worse I wouldn’t even install it making
a Enlightenment respin and most of its user interface elements cover up the items you’re working
on like the drag sliders.

imnho =/ most of enlightenment sufffers from user interface layout issues its so glarly obvisious that I would expect
them to be the layout of a user interface layout thrown together in a day just to see if it would compile and would
expect someone actually testing it to think yeah this is just a alpha alpha version of the layout that would
be fixed the next time I grab a cup of coffee or have time off.

Tons of dialogs do not have interface issues, tons of it is totally polished and beautiful.

Enlightenment is almost total genius in a lot of ways, but without the final polish (layout polish) not
widget polish, and as long as I’ve been trying it, every issue I’ve seen since the beginning of E17
has stayed bugs have been fixed but interface issues like the icons in the settings panel (Settings -> Launcher -> Every Plugin: Plugin, Everything Plugin: Start) look like they’re here to stay.

This is coming from someone who has never filed a bug report, or done anything to help the situation though.
I need to buckle down and learn coding and version control systems and start submitting patches. >_<

My apologies for being so pesimestic about your work, it is a beautiful system, I just feel like nobody
has cared to polish up the last 5% or didn't see the simple stuff that needs it.

This is coming from beer and a allnighter, and probable isn't the place to post this on someone elses
blog.

if you want to vent about my critiising your work, you can reach me at [dre.yeth at ope.nmai.lbox.org]
there is some extra '.'s to fool the the email harvesters.

I hope you can finish soon this project. I would like to try this environment.
But please, keep Moksha as fast and lightweight as possible.
I have an old laptop with a Celeron M CPU, and I would really like if I could use at acceptable speed the new 3.1 Bodhi Linux on this old-timer steam-engine.
(Yes, I know it would be bette if I buyed a new laptop, but in the spirit of the principles of sustainable and green future I try to use all of my devices as long as possible ( = to their run-down/ruination) ).

… I was sorry to read in recent months the abandonment of the project Bodhilinux, I’m glad for this renewed enthusiasm, I installed Bodhilinux (2.4) on different pc outdated to some friends and I think they’re still using, I hope that something will come out of interesting and above all stable. I apologize for my English run by google translator

Greetings, Mr. Hoogland! Sounds like a lovely project! I drifted away from Bodhi, partly from it being too much work to get the desktop the way I like it. Old guy eyes up against TEENSY fonts, mostly. But I squinted, and figured it out, and eventually had a nice desktop. I cared enough about Bodhi to contribute a couple of simple how-tos, on how to get Flash working on an old box, and on how to put folders on shelves. I ran it on a 13-year-old box, which has since died. When I heard about E18, I figured that I’d have a whole new learning curve, and didn’t have the time for that. Sounds like I didn’t miss much. Fonts are a major issue for me, so I’d like to second what Paul of PMB Enterprises said, up the page. Also, it would be good if ALL the pop-up windows during customization could be re-sized, so that using large, legible fonts doesn’t end up clipping window content. E-17 could be so pretty, and so useful, but trying to customize it when your eyesight isn’t so good, that was a bother. It was like: “Yes, of course, short people can use this. We have tools to help you customize it for short people, right there on the top shelf, out of reach…”. One of the things that kept me coming back to e-17 was the sense that it could be so much more than other DEs. It felt like it was continually improving. I liked that. -And it sounds like that is much the direction you plan to take Moksha. So, more power to you, and good luck to all contributors!

I’m writing this comment on a lowly IBM ThinkPad T23 (originally with Win2000) with Bodhi E17 installed for over three years. Runs as smooth as glass, while the Win2000 partition is uh…shall we say typical Windows laggy. I also have another HP laptop that I’ve been using with Bodhi for years too, and I can’t say enough about how I’ve loved using it daily. (I have another HP laptop of the same model that I use Lubuntu on.) In any case, I just want to thank you for making Bodhi Linux available to poor, financially strapped guys like me, and not missing Windows whatsoever.

I tried out E19 and I’m sorry to say, it didn’t run too well on my hardware, plus all those missing themes was a visual letdown. I’m not against change or dealing with a different desktop environment (as proof, my Lubuntu install has over 10 different DE’s to choose from). Sometimes I wish I hadn’t gotten into the hardware end of computers since 1981, and learned to program, but my brain sure couldn’t match the stuff you’ve put out. I’m sure of that. In any case, I’m holding on until August to see what new developments you’ll release. Even if I owned a new, modern laptop, I still would gravitate towards leaner desktop environments and Linux distributions. The standard Ubuntu is just too “flowery” and dumbed-down for me. No matter what you do, there will always be someone put out by it, and others that’ll accept and enjoy the changes. I look forward to whatever you decide to release, and will give it a test run. Oh, and BTW, Bodhi E17 works like a charm on my wife’s Acer “Aspire One” D257-1907 netbook. A total joy to use daily. Thanks again Jeff!

First of all I would like to thank Jeff and all the others that are spening painfull hours to make Bodhi the best Linux ever 🙂
I have installed my first Bodhi at the start of last year after using Ubunt for a couple of years. I was very impressed and have started using it on my other pc’s. This was version 2.4 with the e17 desktop. Last week I decided to give version 3 a try on my netbook. I first installed it with the e19 desktop but found oiut it was very slow and soon decided to install ther legacy version with e17.
This version works well but I al missing my nice looking application bar on the bottom. There is a bar however, but it looks very down-to-earth to say the least… Perhaps I am missing something, but how can I restyle the bottom application bar in a way that it looks the same as on Bodhi 2.4 with the e17 desktop?

Jeff, hi again. 3.0.0 has inspired me sufficiently. The first time I was a Bodhi Linux user is almost 4 years ago, was drawn here by virtue of the bodhi leaf that I had been trying desperately in recent months growing at the doorstep in a pot without much success. Was very upset initially – instead of with the Bodhi Linux team – more so with the East and Central Asian Buddhist community that reeked entirely of anatta and anicca. Spent the past four years returning again and again this Bodhi project and website, on and off would have shared the isos via torrents when the bandwidth was available. Now without thinking too much, honestly, joining the Bodhi Linux team remained a wish that I worked very hard at abstaining from. For technical reasons yes, because in as many years of works as a software and database engineer in Singapore I mostly did project coordination, implementation and deployment instead of the hard core mathematics and sciences stuffs. I was an engineer at worst a technical consultant instead of a mathematician or scientist.

Part of the reason why Bodhi Linux did obscure me the slightest, was because I was trying to figure out how to get Gnome working by default as a desktop manager of Bodhi Linux. Enlightenment as you rightly mentioned was a major piece of invention that may come with its own bugs and flaws. Especially when Bodhi was derived from Ubuntu – the Human technology – which in turn was derived from Debian the Cosmic spiral, I figured that on a daily use either I stuck with Debian, or Windows came in this year promising pirates free upgrades to its Windows 10 that I have been testing with little renewed interest other than the returned-start-button. Still Jeff Hoogland and his team was and remain as an inspiration that really kept me going these four years with glimmers of interests almost every other day.

When I first joined the forum, the only area I thought of contributing Bodhi Linux apart from the limited donations were the Chinese language pack translations. Opensuse came in then told me how I would spend more time figuring out Susestudio which also has the enlightenment desktop as well as the midori browser as part of their patterns and packages.

Having created before a Samsara linux operating system with Susestudio and maintained it since, I took it offline while renaming it less religiously in respect of Bodhi Linux perhaps that set me forth on this academic and technical research. As a student of Jeff’s endeavour, I sincerely thank Him. 🙂

I don’t know whether will I still want to join the Bodhi Linux project, because back then I once loved an e-sangha that was also by a fellow Singaporean until a hacker apparently took it offline, what never left my mind was how I would have reimplemented an e-sangha while also offering the Bodhi Linux OS particular in the context of a Chinese audience, it never happened till today though.

I won’t want to own much lesser champion a linux project under my name either.

Thank you for sharing this. I used the Bodhi 3.0 beta for months and was very pleased with it. Enlightenment had some minor intermittent stability problems, but for the most part it was fast and stable enough to be usable. When the 3.0 release was announced, I installed it on three systems without hesitation, including my work system as a replacement for Fedora with e16 and KDE.

I’m not sure what happened between the Bodhi beta and the 3.0 release, but the system took a huge performance hit and stability suffered. I found Enlightenment freezing on average 2-3 times per shift on my work computer. The mouse cursor could still be moved, and if I was streaming audio in a browser, that would continue to work, but the console would be otherwise frozen, and attempting to drop out of X with Ctrl-Alt-F1 would freeze the console completely. I work in a fast-paced support center, and I simply don’t have time to troubleshoot a workstation issue while my customers are waiting. The only practical solution was a hard reset, and carrying a spare bootable flash drive for a worst-case scenario.

On my home systems, performance was just noticeably slower, and E would leak memory, sometimes taking multiple gigabytes. If I restarted E, the old instance would still run until I SIGKILL’ed it.

I didn’t contact you because I wanted to do my homework first. I had not found the time to properly troubleshoot the issue and check for similar reports on the forums, and the freezes were only reproducible on one machine, so I suspected the hardware might be playing a role. In short, I didn’t want to complain until I also had the time to put together a decent bug report and help work toward a solution.

I’m interested to see what you do with Moksha. I have mixed feelings about forks, but I’ll gladly give it a try. For the time being, I’m replacing Bodhi at work to see if another OS will meet my stability and performance needs. I’ll probably be going back to e16 as well. I’ll still keep at least one Bodhi system at home, and I’ll look for opportunities to be more involved. Thank you for your work on the project.

I used Bodhi for a little while and enjoyed it very much. The only real issue i had is that i like to have my close, minimize, and maximize buttons on the left side of the window (like a mac). I dont use osx or even own a mac for that matter but considering that we read from left to right it makes sense to have the buttons on the left side. Im sure that most people like there buttons on the right side of the window but having more options is never a bad thing is it? is there any way to make a setting that places the windows on the left side?

OMG! This is great news! I was thinking this days exactly like you. When E17 is finally oficially released and even new versions are coming (E18, E19 and even E20), instead of being excited, I just started to feel that Enlightenment was not so excing like in the good old days of E17 in 2007 and 2008. So many changes and all the cool stuff going away 🙁 Still longing for the good old days of Ecomorph and all those great e-modules that were available, like drawer, itask-ng, flames, rain and so much more. Great luck with Moksha and all the best for you. Enlightenment’s developers are great, Enlightenment is great, but it just seems that they dont have the timing nor the organization it takes to move forward with a project so great… Lot’s of cool featured from E16 (and themes ) wasn’t in E17 and it already bothered me a lot. of course it was totally rewriten, but they already should have it patched for E17…

Good luck with Bodhi and Moksha! This is really the greatest distro ever.

Will the moksha desktop be similar to the Mate desktop? Mate was a fork of Gnome 2 after it was abandoned for Gnome 3 Sounds like you will take good old e17, make improvements and when you can, import goodies from e18, e19, etc.? Sounds like how Mate got started to me and it is a damn good desktop! I wish the same success for Moksha!

To the Bodhi Team, I’d like to add my thanks for your work with Bodhi 3 and best wishes for this Moksha desktop.
As I have settled on Bodhi as my linux distro of choice (literally dozens of distros tried) you can take that as a complement. I feel you should know what/why your distro won out over all others; the means for the user to arrange the virtual desktops to house the shelves and iBars contents where / how they chose is the distinction Bodhi affords its users. The closest competition was the Full Monty version of PCLinuxOS, but that, as the name implies, brings an excess of apps with it that tend to be excessive / extraneous at least to my needs / wants.
As I use a re-BIOSed (Now running John Lewis’s SeaBios) HP falco laptop, I am having to use your “chromebook” legacy Bodhi due to the fact the kernel in your 3.0.0 isn’t 3.17 or newer. So the drivers for the trackpad are not in your 3.0.0. It will do for the near term, but I much prefer the 64 bit flavor of bodhi and so hope that when you offer the Moksha Desktop that either you’ll use a kernel 3.17 or newer or include the drivers for the HP Falco Chromebook trackpad (as you have in this 32bit Chromebook Bodhi) in the 64bit variant of Moksha.

Thanks for whatever you can compose towards my wish list above. I have confidence you (as a team) will endeavor to turn out a product worthy of your abilities.

If Jeff is joining that solus project, pls consider working with us instead – we have been keen on the Bodhi OS over the recent years as part of our environmentalism efforts – Bodhi Linux in its version 2 days figured and featured intensively in recycling faulty laptops that could be salvaged by a good thought of – ahem – bodhi or bodhicitta perhaps. Still, we knew that as engineers we would run into conflict of interests with Bodhi Linux if we continued studying the Bodhi source codes and project lifecycles, so especially in the recent weeks or months we adjourned our scope along the lines of something that may work with, and on Bodhi linux or simply all linuxes. The notion or idea of a Bodhi Studio came about, possibly inspired by Eclipse, Aptana Studio, Zend Studio and somewhat awkwardly Xamarin Studio as well as Visual Studio.

Bodhi Studio may simply be yet another Integrated Development Environment.

In terms of intended development audience and scope, probably Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Chinas, and India instead of primarily Europe and Americas.

On the topic of Bodhi, our mothers may not want all of us to become monks, somebody has to do the cittas that keep Bodhi projects going.

Yet if I have to go figure out which of the two is the real and authentic 17th Karmapa in Tibet or whether is the Taiwanese nun Venerable Cheng Yen a manifestation of a major Bodhisattva or did the Singaporean founding prime minister Mr Lee Kuan Yew attain bodhisattvahood, a better bet is doing some programming and upkeeping Bodhi Linux while making Bodhi Studio a feasible buddhist’s ‘excuse’.

1) keep Moksha minimalistic
2) make compatible with e16 themes and keep e17 too – i install new e19 and more e17 themes doesmnt works
3) next think what is for me quiet horible in Enlightenment e17 and higher is setting dialogs, its there any plan to make one system-settings menu with shared other settings

Hi Jeff,
I was so glad to hear a few months back that you had returned to the Bodhi project. I still use Bodhi 2.0 and continue to love it. I do agree however that E19+ are a step for Englightenment in the wrong and backwards direction. I hope they fix the mess soon so you don’t need to maintain and support E17 and instead move forward with never E releases.
You’ve done great with Bodhi and I am sure you will do the same with Moksha. Keep up the phenomenally great work!

Jeff, something I’ve longed to see for ages was the simple, classic desktop layout for Enlightenment, so I’m going to try the Moksha DE. I feel you’ve made the right decision forking E, as you may well end up being Enlightenment’s last chance to remain a DE, and not just disappear as a smartphone library.

good luck to you! I always like your distro for sticking to your guns. Keep It Simple Stupid 🙂 You guys are one of the few that still offer non-PAE options! I loved KDE3, Gnome 2, but not anymore.. too much changed. I love XFCE… it just amazes me what you can squeak out or E17 with minimal Hardware!

Greetings to Jeff. Salvation for old hardware does come from a mix of the Moksha Desktop and elements of the Trinity Desktop. I use e17WM and konqueror-trinity and koffice-trinity and krita-trinity and 2 OpenGEU good old themes.

First off, thank you for all or your time and effort keeping Bodhi alive. I went back and forth between it an Ubuntu/Unity and Ubuntu/Enlightenment for a while, periodically encountering a bug that sent me back from one to the other several times. Since the release ofBodhi 3.0, I haven’t felt any compunction to switch.

I understand and appreciate the benefits of going back a step and advancing along a slightly different path with Moksha, anddon’t question that decision, but was happy to hear that users would have a choice between the two. I would prefer to stay with E19, rather than retrain against established habits. I see that E19 was loaded with the software, but have not found instructions as to where I can change the startup sequence so the E19 is chosen by default.

I apologize for the neophyte question, but if you could point me toward a document, I’d be most appreciative.

Thank you Jeff and everyone else behind Bohdi Linux. I first used Bohdi at version 2 or so and It quickly became my prefered DE/DM. It became like PC Heroine. I was checking out the wide range of Linux DE’s haveing broken away from Windows that I had been useing since 3.1. Even with windows back then I pitched Progman and other parts for the better more capable PowerApps by hDC. Anyway I now have settled in with Bohdi haveing installed it along side XUbuntu with instructions found here. All of the stuff I used under Xubuntu still works, including my VirtualBox install of XP pro, although Wine is used for a couple old games, and Dosbox for some DOS version of ORCAD and EasyCAD I still use occasionally.
The hitches have been few and far between, and will be even fewwer if I can get some themeing going on. I am truly amazed at how well E17 and now Moksha works on my old hardware. Thanks again

Hi Jeff, I really hope this works out for us. I really love Bodhi and I have been an E fan since 1997. I would love to help out, not least by fixing the anoying bugs I have on my own desktop, utfortunatly I have not been able to learn, althoug I have been programing for over 30 years.

To be honest, if you would do a hackers weekend to teach how E works, and charge us 2000€ for the privilage, I would come 😛

I “was” a full time daily user of Bodhi from the very beginning , however abandoned it when 3 came out. It just didn’t appeal to me anymore. I tried several different distributions over the last year or so and never found anything as nice to use as 2.4. I still have several different machines that are still using 2.4 and I never wanted to do any updates for fear of breaking them. Well, today something told me to come and see what Bodhi has been up to and I’m absolutely thrilled to hear Jeff is back at the helm. For reasons completely unrelated to Bodhi and more related to Linux in general, I have switched back to Win7, however I still miss so many things from Bodhi and E17. As I write this I’m already making a list of what I need to do before the upgrade. I thought that Bodhi was dead and gone forever. First the new Star Wars and now Bodhi lives, what a wonderful end to 2015.

You were far from the only one who felt a bit lost with releases after 2.4. With the return to an E17 based Moksha I have received a lot of positive feedback from these users. Hopefully you will be another 🙂

Besides performance increases, Moksha runs faster than E on even my i7 system with a dedicated graphics card, support for things like advance theme options and third party modules are the draw to Moksha.

Jeff, I love the fact you’re still dedicated to Bodhi. But for me (perhaps I’m in some sort of distro burn-out) the old version of Bodhi that’s sitting on my 8-year old HP Compaq 6715b laptop now is going to stay there indefinitely. I’ve downloaded and played about with all the other version since then, and I’m not sure I want to bother budging. That’s not how I usually am either. I have tried just about every distro out there, and have stuck with distros like Zorin, Lubuntu, PCLinux OS, and Mint.

The thing that captivated me about Bodhi was the Enlightenment desktop and the blazing speed of it (even on old hardware) . It’s great on larger screens but really sucks on tiny netbook ones.Everything is just too damn small.

So from my perspective, Enlightenment is kind of the thing that makes Bodhi less versatile and/or compatible among a wide range of computer products. Its visual appeal is hard to beat though. I’ve also had issues with some versions not finding my wireless chip. This is something that’s not just exclusive to Bodhi though. Other distros don’t detect my Broadcom chip too.

In any case, I’m still waiting for the watershed moment that’ll make me replace my existing old version of Bodhi, which runs rock solid and has all the speed and functionality I’d ever want in that ol’ ‘puter. Your dedication and hard work is what keeps me coming back to test out your latest versions, even if I don’t install them. I think it’ll just be a matter of time before I jump back on the bandwagon and swap out that old version for your latest creation. 🙂

Honestly not much reason to swap out a working OS. I still have Bodhi 3.2 installed on some of my own computers and they will likely stay that way till Ubuntu 14.04 it uses as the base is out of support.

Great job on Bodhi and Moksha, a big thank you from the community…
It`s always nice to catch up on history and understand why a developer adds X, forks Y, tweaks A etc…
Two Q`s: do you maintain a repo for Fedora? And do you support UEFI installing?